Warren Murphy: Last Call

He saw Nina turn toward them. She had been facing her husband over a distance of six feet. When she saw Chiun and Remo she turned again toward her husband. Her finger closed on the trigger of the pistol she held in her hand. But she was too late.

The tiny Oriental, his green kimono swirling

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about him, moved in front of her. As the gun fired, he deflected her hand and the bullet dug into the ceiling of the room. Then Chiun had the gun from her hand.

He gave it to Remo.

"Compliments of the Great Ung," he said.

The premier's face was ashen with shock.

"Nina," he said heavily. "You? Why?"

The woman looked at him for a moment, then dropped her head and began to weep. "Because I had to," she sobbed. "I had to."

Remo put his arm around the woman.

"It's okay now. It's all right," he said.

The premier came up to his wife, and took her hands in his. He waited until she lifted her eyes to meet his.

"We go home now, I think," he said.

"Not until I get my ride on the train," Chiun said, inspecting his Mickey Mouse watch.

The President and the premier had met at the White House and issued a joint statement that both condemned all acts of political terrorism and would work jointly to prevent the kind of senseless violence that had cost the lives of three Russian ambassadors in the past week. Project Omega was not mentioned.

Nina met with the President's wife for tea and at a press conference later charmed everyone by announcing how smart and pretty the President's wife was, and that the President's daughter who had spilled a cup of tea on Nina's dress would benefit from a good spanking.

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The body of Vassily Karbenko, a cultural attache at the Russian embassy in Washington, was found in a lake in Florida. He had been on vacation and apparently had been drowned in a boating accident.

Smith looked across his desk. "I don't understand why," he said.

"MacCleary had gotten close to Nina in the old days," Remo said. "Her husband was barely able to make a living. MacCleary conned her somehow into taking money from him. She needed it to keep the family alive."

"Did he tell her that she'd have to kill her own husband if he became premier ?"

"Yes, but she never thought it would happen. Then one day it did and she was stuck."

"Why?" said Smith. "Couldn't she just ignore the Project Omega signal ?"

"MacCleary had filled her head full of crap," Remo said. "He had told her that if she didn't act, America would have documents to prove that she was an American spy, and we'd release the documents. This would bring her husband down in disgrace. Probably send both of them to the slave camps. It was better, she figured, for the premier to get killed in America. He'd be regarded then as a glorious Russian hero. She'd rather have her husband a dead patriot than the live husband-of-a-traitor and maybe a traitor himself."

Smith shook his head. "We didn't have any information to release on her. She was safe." "She didn't know that. MacCleary had really

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done a number on her. She didn't say it, but I think they were probably a thing one time. She used to be a good-looking woman," Remo said.

"Well," Smith said, "all's well that ends well."

"You think it ended well?" Remo said.

"Yes. Didn't it?"

"Karbenko died," said Remo. "He was one of them but he was a good man."

"And if the CIA hadn't gotten him, we would have had to," Smith said. "He knew too much."

"That's our rule, right?" said Remo. "Anybody who finds out about CURE is dead meat, right?"

"I wouldn't put it in exactly those terms," Smith said. "But that's about it."

Remo stood up.

"Thank you, Smitty. Have a nice day."

Ruby followed him into the outside office.

"You're strung really tight today," she said. "What's wrong?"

"Karbenko would have had to die because he knew about us," Remo said. "Well somebody else knows about us. And he's still alive."

Ruby shrugged. "Rank has its privileges," she said. "I guess one of them privileges is staying alive."

Remo held her face in his hands and smiled coldly at her.

"Maybe," he said.

It happened just after Time magazine's deadline and by the time the next issue came out, the other press had all covered the story to death.

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So Time's story was brief:

When Admiral Wingate Stantington, the newly appointed head of the CIA, drowned in the bathtub in his private office bathroom last week, his body was not discovered for a day. CIA personnel had to break into the bathroom by cutting away a lock that had been installed only the week before (at the usual Washington, B.C., cost of $23.65).

Three days later, Ruby yelled at Remo for wasting $23.65 of taxpayers' money and told him if he did it again, she'd give him more trouble than he could handle.